I love to look around cemeteries and graveyards, I find them fascinating places. Particularly those containing the remains of people from long ago. I wander around looking at the names, dates of birth and death and wondering. A collection of graves, or a family tomb can help you create a picture in your mind of the lives people may have led. Did they live long lives, marry young or later on. Did they have children who died young, or did they go on to have families of their own? All questions with potentially no obvious answer.
A final Resting place
Cemeteries abroad are often a little different from here in the UK. For a start they tend not to be near to a church. Catholic cemeteries in France and Spain are often large, containing large mausoleums, or little huts with coffins in side.
On one of our first holidays together Master and I travelled to Lisbon and there we discovered a magnificent cemetery specifically for British people. Though there were actually people from other nations buried there too.
Last year we visited the area around the Somme in France, and saw the enormity of the loss of life from world war 1. Row after row of white headstones, many of which unmarked as the remains were of unknown soldiers. Beautifully kept with flowers between graves they quite took the breath away. In contrast the German graveyards were dark, sombre places. As with the allied graves though, they contained the bodies of young men. Many of whom were not, or barely out of their teenage years.
Fun in a graveyard
I can’t imagine wanting to strip off for photos, or to have sex in those places. It would be highly disrespectful and inappropriate. But I can imagine doing so in some of the old churchyards here in the UK. There is something daring but exciting about such a prospect. Perhaps it is the age of the graves and that often you can barely read who resides beneath. Or that they are often quiet, spooky places with few visitors especially around dusk. Maybe the grass is overgrown and the plants a little uncared for, offering an opportunity to hide. I don’t know. But this does feel like an opportunity as yet unexplored.
I would highly recommend it. and it is fascinating how different cultures deal with their dead. Asia has many fascinating ways as well
When the opportunity arises, maybe we will! 🙂
We actually have both here in the Netherlands – cemeteries right next to churches and cemeteries far away from them. I am always intrigued to see old graves in churches, or visit military graveyards.
Rebel xox
Yes I agree, those one that are oddly stark and clinical do not stir me in the same way at all
Mollyx
I guess that is the point. It doesn’t make me want to visit them any less though.
I so enjoyed reading this Julie as I share your passion for visiting cemeteries. I was in a small Norfolk churchyard near me the other day and came across two war graves. One from WW1 and the other from WW2. They were both of young men of 19. And than I came across the grave of another 19 year old who died only last year. The words on it were so moving that I started to cry. I was also thinking of my great uncle Joseph Hogan who died at Beaumont Hamel on the first day of the Somme, also aged 19. I think I might give graveyards a miss for a week or two.
Yes, they can be so very sad. Particularly where someone so young has died. And it is so rare these days that it pulls you up short. xx
I also have some mixed feelings about taking nude photos in cemeteries, especially ones in which people may have been buried recently. I’m not a superstitious person, and the photos I’ve seen other people take in graveyards always some out really well, but it just doesn’t sit right with me for some reason.
Yes I have visited WW1 graves in France very humbling experience xx